Hide and Seek

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo) and
a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

A recurring theme in these 20 stories is the tension between our privacy
and our quests.

Most of the stories are quite short, and some of them feel unfinished.
“Burnout,” for example, is a six-page detailing of the deadening
boredom that a high-school teacher feels while waiting for the
three-o’clock bell to ring. This story is reminiscent of Virginia
Woolf’s essay “The Spot on the Wall,” but with far less action.
The meandering “Best Friends,” on the other hand, could use paring;
its greatest asset is Thompson’s depiction of Anna, a doughy suburban
housewife with a Yamaha motorcycle.

The prose here is strong, and often very funny. For example, in the
poignant “Dreamers,” a teenage girl describes a hated turquoise
swimsuit: “It made me acutely conscious of myself as a large creature
entirely composed of meat.” Perhaps the most powerful story in the
collection is “Singularity,” in which a man who used to perform in
an old-style freak show is befriended— and later betrayed—by a
female documentarian.